Slashdot Mirror
Lowering the Cost of Biofuel Production
sciencehabit writes: 2014 was a banner year for making automotive fuel from nonfood crops, with a series of major new production plants opening in the United States. However, producing this so-called cellulosic ethanol remains considerably more expensive than gasoline. So researchers are always on the lookout for new ways to trim costs. Now they have a new lead: a microbe that can use abundant nitrogen gas as the fertilizer it needs to produce ethanol from plants. The discovery (abstract) is "a major commercial accomplishment for biofuel production," says microbiologist Steven Ricke.
...that will ultimately end up where it started - the research lab. And in the meantime we mostly continue guzzling traditional fuel with the exception of a few EVs (with an admittedly fringe popularity).
is an engine than runs on shit. Need some fuel? Pull them down and let er rip. Someone giving you shit? Thank him and be one your way.
Sad to see that yet another person, when faced with the problem of our reliance on fossil fuels, turns to alcohol.
I'd tell them to get off my lawn, but if there's a chance they can turn my grass into fuel for my car, I guess I'll let them stay.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Perhaps a bit too much like the unlikely back story to Interstellar for comfort...
That stuff is nasty! It'll mess up your engine, hurt your gas mileage and do little if anything to clear the atmosphere.
If we accept it's about cleaner air. And we assume that it burns X% cleaner. And we assume that we will burn X% more fuel over the same distance ... What have we gained? I have seen good arguments for using biodiesel but not ethanol.
It's all about corporate welfare. Big corporations and well funded universities make a show of looking for clean, efficient alternative fuels while sucking up taxpayer dollars. Where is MY lobbyist? Who will pay to overhaul my engine when it corrodes internally?
...omphaloskepsis often...
Could we please slay the ethanol white elephant? It has lousy energy density and is highly corrosive. There are far better fuels out there.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I'm surprised that the blurb didn't emphasize that the microbe in question is also a nitrogen fixer. Which means that it not only produces fuels but also fertilizer without needing additional energy input (bear in mind that a large chunk of Koch Industries income is from the sale of fossil-fuel based ammonia.)
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
There are more costs than economic ones to consider. Making ethanol uses vast amounts of water -- water that is then not available for other uses. If they could find a way to do it with, say, sea water, that would be one thing, but in the Midwest, where much of the production is, water is becoming a scarce resource.
I'd like to see whole biofuel process end to end to better understand how green it really is. Biofuel might look pretty growing in the field, but i'll bet the refinery process is as big ugly, industrial as the petro refinery process. There was a 60 minutes show one time where they showed glycerin being dumped from a biofuel refinery into a stream. Glycerin is not toxic but the concentration was so high the fish and everything else in the stream were suffocating.
I read an article in Motortrend back in the early 90's. It stated that someone got a patent for a bacteria that you could spread over garbage and as it ate it, it would produce methanol. Where is that technology today?
Why over all these years of bio fuel discussion aren't companies seriously considering using industrial hemp? It's fast growing (3 yields per year), a hearty crop and a 97% conversion rate. Also, it doesn't compete with corn which is a feed crop.
http://www.gizmag.com/hemp-biodiesel-dope-biofuel/16852/
What I want to know is why is it so goddamn hard for those farms to just switch to growing soybeans instead?
Chicken and egg. There has to be a market for their product before it makes sense to grow soybeans.
If we grew soybeans instead of corn then we could make biodiesel -- which actually is efficient to produce -- and get rid of the "ethanol is stupid because it costs more fossil fuels than it saves" problem once and for all!
Citation please. Specifically please prove the following:
1) That either ethanol or biodiesel result in a net energy gain since both require expenditures of fossil fuels to grow the crops and bring them to market.
2) That there is sufficient available arable land to make a meaningful impact on energy needs without impacting food production.
3) Explain how any use of bio-fuels will solve or meaningfully mitigate the problems of gasoline/diesel pollution including carbon.
Being that it takes two barrels of gasoline to make one barrel of ethanol, growing the corn and turning it into ethanol, than please let it DIE. I beg you all, please separate bio-diesel and ethanol into two separate discussions.
The rest of the title subject should be...So we can sustain higher pollution than gasoline! Ethanol is a joke and the general public buys into it.
Let's take more plant material off of the land which means that we'll have to replace the nutrients. We do that with fertilizer (most of it derived from fossil fuels) that don't completely stay in the fields and contaminate our waterways. Wonderful.